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Fitting rooms or pigpens?

I don’t know if people have just gotten more thoughtless and disgusting or if I’ve just never noticed until recently. You know those little hooks inside fitting rooms at clothing stores? Why do they always have 20 items already hanging on them? Is it really that difficult to carry your items back out to the rack that’s RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE FITTING ROOM DOOR???? It’s not as if the store expects you to put everything back on the proper rack. They pay people (not well, but they do pay them) to make sure the items get back on the proper rack.

And, no, store employees are not there to simply pick up after you. They are there to keep the store looking decent and shoppable and to assist customers with finding items. It’s hard to find a certain blouse when it’s at the bottom of a pile in the fitting room floor.

I have always tried on one item at a time (or one outfit at a time) and then hung it back up before putting the next one on. (I confess that I don’t usually button all the buttons back.) So it baffled me when I started working at a department store last fall and had to spend several hours a day picking up clothes from the fitting room floor and hanging them back up. Then there was the customer who was nice enough to hang all her clothes back up…but she hung up at least 20 items WRONG SIDE OUT. Why would you even bother? Did she have a private vendetta against $6/hour department store employees? Who knows.

I don’t work there any longer, but now I notice the fitting rooms even more when I shop somewhere. (Shopping and trying on clothes is not my favorite pasttime anyway.) I live in a relatively affluent area, so I have to wonder if poorer areas are worse or if the rich are worse because they think picking up after themselves is beneath them?